Google’s June 2024 spam update is now complete. The process began on June 20, 2024, and officially ended June 27, 2024.
Google announced the release of its June 2024 spam update yesterday, causing concern and uncertainty among small website owners. The update is expected to take a week to roll out in full and it’s the first major algorithm update since March, adding to a growing list of disruptive ranking changes for website owners in the past several months.
While Google hasn’t revealed what the update will look at specifically, cracking down on spam content is the overall stated focus. The news follows Google’s algorithm leak and the recent launch of Google’s AI Overviews, which threaten to further eat into all-important real estate at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Unfortunately, small site owners, already stung by recent algo impacts, may fear the latest spam update could further impact their rankings and traffic negatively.
A Volatile Time for Websites
Publishers and SEO experts have had enough of Google disrupting the SERPs. Rankings tanked or fluctuated for many websites following Google’s Core Update in March, so any new Google announcement can be cause for concern.
According to Google’s spam update documentation, sites that feel as though the rollout has impacted them should review its spam policies. Failing to do so may mean they “may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.”
Elmo Joeleht on X said this in response to the announcement:
“Does the SPAM stand for “Small Publishers Are Meaningless? I miss the days when updates favored better content rather than prioritizing big players and killing content sites by calling them spam.”
Will Grice, the Head of Audience Development at MVF, spoke to us in the hope of reassuring smaller sites:
I would say the spam update shouldn’t massively impact smaller sites unless they are spammy. The overall impact of these has been relatively small on many sites – the majority of the ones that get impacted tend to be spam or AI-generated sites.
Google needs to win back the trust of small website owners, whose content forms a vast pillar of the internet, and prove that it’s genuinely rewarding the best content, and not just large publishers or forums, such as Reddit. Can this be achieved through the latest spam update? Time will tell. We’ll update our readers once the update is complete.
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